


evening star, in thy glory afar

by AureliaAstralis



Series: a sky full of stars, what a heavenly view [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Constellations, F/M, Greek Mythology - Freeform, M/M, Multi, Reincarnation, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-06 22:25:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3150527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AureliaAstralis/pseuds/AureliaAstralis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And yet, on days when he let his mind wander to the memory of her face and her smile, Steve still didn’t know how the woman could stand next to Bucky’s old form and still be so goddamn beautiful.</p><p>He <i>knew</i> the man on the bridge, the man on the airship – he knew, through the dreams and the pulsing of the odd shape wrapping around his collarbones like a necklace – and even though he saw two different lives, remembered two different names, the face remained the same.</p><p>He froze, eyes darting between his metal hand and the glowing mark on the inside of her wrist before literally sprinting out of the lab, and when she looked to Steve she couldn’t hide her flinch at the dark glower he gave her as he went after James.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ganymede

**Author's Note:**

> What happens when you take the soulmate trope, add a semester of Intro to Astronomy and a childhood love for mythology?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And yet, on days when he let his mind wander to the memory of her face and her smile, Steve still didn’t know how the woman could stand next to Bucky’s old form and still be so goddamn beautiful.

When Steve woke up in a clean white room, the first thing he did was yank up the edge of his shirt, ignoring the tense uneasiness registering at the roar of baseball game on the radio. The familiar commentary faded into the background in favor of crushing grief at the sight of the scattering of freckles on his hipbones, tinted a dull grey.

His attention was drawn away when a pretty young woman entered the room, and his niggling feeling of unease skyrocketed when he raked his eyes over her clinically. The shape of her bra was too soft and round, the black heel of her shoes too high and slender, the long messy curls that no woman would be caught dead sporting in public _–_

_“I’m gonna ask you again… where am I?”_

Later that night, when he was finally settled into a SHIELD-issued apartment, Steve let himself fall into a familiar sleep – only for the memory-myths to spiral into nightmares come true. He felt like a ghost, screaming soundlessly as he watched a body falling from a train, saw outstretched hands reaching into the darkness and bloody fields sown with the bodies of fallen soldiers, and felt the utter sorrow painted in a lovely face. He woke up gasping, his cheeks wet as his body ached with phantom pains, and he took a boiling hot shower that would’ve burned the skin off anyone else.

The mark on his hip, however, stayed cold and silent.

Steve spent the next two weeks or so sustaining himself on half-hour naps every few hours, to keep the memories at bay. When he finally let himself fall into bed, not long after the disaster that was Loki and the Battle of New York, he was too exhausted to remember that he wasn’t supposed to fall asleep.

He dreamt of Bucky, as Steve knew him from two different lifetimes – warm hands splayed across golden pricks of light seeping through pale skin, the soothing sound of plucked strings on a lyre, a voice that could charm man and beast alike – but then they shifted. He saw unfamiliar crinkled blue eyes paired with a beatific smile, felt soft white feathers brushing against his calves, and inhaled the scent of incense and jasmine from silk-soft hair. When plump blood-red lips brushed the edge of his ear he jerked away so violently that he fell off the bed, waking to the feeling of needles running inwards from the flat of his right hand.

The oddly-shaped cross that ran over the lines of his palm tingled every time he touched his own skin, humming warmly in a way that made Steve ache with remembrance of the other mark hidden beneath the waistband of his pants. He didn’t know if it was because Bucky was gone – _dead_ – or maybe Steve had simply always been destined for another, but it made him so bitter and angry that he spent hours staring at the cluster of lines on his hand, wishing that he could peel away layers of skin until all that remained was a blank palm and Bucky’s mark. It wasn’t fair, as if the new mark was just confirmation of Bucky’s death and that Steve was destined to move on. He didn’t _want_ anyone else.

He made the mistake once, of letting his new mark touch the one on his hip, and his knees buckled out under him from the overwhelming surge of _want_ , boiling over like lava flowing into the sea – slow and steady and hot. There were two sets of hands, two sets of eyes, two smirks paired with equally mesmerizing laughs, and Steve had drunk in the sight of them with greed.

Orpheus looked the way he always had: dark hair falling to his shoulders and thick lashes framing grey-blue eyes, the color of the clouds just before the rain. The woman at his side, pale and lush and lovely, nearly matched him in coloring with chestnut curls and blue eyes that sparkled like the Aegean Sea under the hot Grecian sun. The anger and bitterness faded as he stared at her face, further so when Orpheus gathered her up in one arm and beckoned at Steve with the other, and he couldn’t stop himself from reaching forward and engulfing both of them in a crushing embrace.  He woke with the memory of the woman’s supple skin under his hands, his mark singing as it touched her, and the image of Orpheus kissing her was blazed across the backs of his eyelids in a way that made him remember his anger.

He knew about life-marks, about past lives and the stars and the heavens. It should’ve been easy to find her, to find his _other_ soulmate – the mere thought of it left a bitter taste in his mouth – but he buried the urge under missions and sleepless nights and the memory of Bucky and Bucky alone. And yet, on days when he let his mind wander to the memory of her face and her smile, Steve still didn’t know how the woman could stand next to Bucky’s old form and still be so goddamn beautiful.

He took careful pains to keep his palm hidden, his fingers often curled in on themselves into fists, and developed a habit for covering his hands whenever he could – hand wraps at the gym, motorcycle gloves when he went out, or tucked into his pockets in the most casual manner he could manage. Natasha was the only one who really knew about both marks, even if she had found out by accident. She’d looked at the life-mark on his hand curiously, but when she saw the greyed out color of the other she had stared at it for so long that Steve couldn’t help snapping at her.

 _“It's just, I’ve seen one like that before,”_ she said thoughtfully, and Steve knew the pity was well hidden under the veneer of sympathy _. “A man I used to know, his mark was the same way – cold and still. I’m sorry.”_

He remembered the scattering of markings that fanned across the span of her shoulders like curled up wings, still dark and pristine against her pale skin, and Steve forced himself to swallow the biting words that threatened to spill out at the hollow-sounding sentiment.

_You wouldn't, couldn’t possibly understand._

Nearly a year later, after unmasking the Winter Soldier and watching as Bucky just stared at him with a sort of shell-shocked stillness, Steve was a world away even as Natasha reached out and made the freckles sweeping up Sam’s ribcage explode into a trail of sparkling light.

The mark on his hip had turned back to a dark black, as clear and sharp as it had been back before Steve even ever _met_ Bucky, and it was like a promise and a second chance both rolled into one.

_“I’m with you, ‘til the end of the line.”_

* * *

**“Proud evening star,**  
 **in thy glory afar,**  
 **and dearer thy beam shall be.”**  
\- Edgar Allan Poe, _Evening Star_


	2. Orpheus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He _knew_ the man on the bridge, the man on the airship – he knew, through the dreams and the pulsing of the odd shape wrapping around his collarbones like a necklace – and even though he saw two different lives, remembered two different names, the face remained the same.

For years, the Asset couldn’t remember what he was like before being remade, but under all the gunpowder dust and grenade smoke in his lungs, and beneath the freeze-burned ice that seemed permanently etched into his bones, he knew one thing for certain: that no matter what lies HYDRA fed to him, there  _was_  someone, who had – fiercely, feverishly,  _foolishly_  – loved him, once upon a time.

He just didn’t know who it was, until he saw the man on the bridge.

They wiped him again, but somehow it didn’t work properly this time because he  _remembered_  the man’s face, warring between disbelief and joy and despair and hope, and when he had plunged into the Potomac River with the remains of those giant airships the Asset dove after him with a long-buried instinct that screamed,  _save him, savehimsavehim **savehim**  – !_

And when he hit the water,  _everything_  started to come _back_.

He  _knew_  the man on the bridge, the man on the airship – he knew, through the dreams and the pulsing of the odd shape wrapping around his collarbones like a necklace – and even though he saw two different lives, remembered two different names, the face remained the same.

_Ganymede, Steve_. Serving gods in one life, serving country in another, but still more beautiful than Adonis and Apollo put together.  _I remember._

Bits and pieces were missing, but what little that lingered washed over him like a balm to his aching, lonely soul. HYDRA had tried to erase the man away, the same way they tried erasing everything else – but there were things that remained imprinted in the subconscious of his memory like phantoms and ghosts, things that pushed up to the surface and brought him to his knees in a long-awaited, broken reprieve. Golden light and golden hair seeping through the cracks of his fingers, artist’s hands doodling mazes up the tanned planes of his chest, and lying in a bed of woven dark space and starlight – they leeched away the demons and horrors that followed him for the past seventy-odd years, the fears that hunted him in his waking moments and chased him even in cryostasis.

It was odd to think of himself as something, some _one_ , other than the Asset. And although his life as Orpheus may not have been his present past, or his present self, he found it was easier to reconcile himself with a man he could pretend was just a myth, rather than the smiling image of himself memorialized at the Smithsonian. Steve Rogers’s Bucky was lost, possibly gone forever, but Orpheus, and to a lesser degree  _Barnes_  – morally loose and less focused on the nuances of good and evil, from what he was slowly beginning to recall – was halfway in between.

He could manage halfway in between.

It took weeks to recover enough of himself, but once he did he locked the Winter Soldier in the recesses of his head and started running. The supposed wild goose chase across the globe was entirely intentional, if he was being honest with himself – a test to see if Steve was really just chasing after his soulmate, or if he was just looking for the Bucky he wanted to remember.

In the beginning, it had been more about escaping, fleeing from a second chance he didn’t deserve, and he’d thrown everything he could at the man and his dark-skinned bird friend. He led them straight into former HYDRA bases, watched as they fumbled through the traps he’d set – he’d even taken a fair number of shots at both of them, shooting the flying man out of the sky and making a point to at least graze them both at least four or five times when they managed to catch up to him. Beyond a few lucky breaks, he made it a point to stay just out of reach, often lingering long enough for Steve to catch a glimpse of him before disappearing amongst the chaos he left behind.

After nearly eight months of playing cat and mouse, all while Steve and his bird friend diligently trailed him, he stopped running. He had stood in plain sight and methodically dropped each one of the weapons on his person into a neat pile at his feet, patiently waiting until Steve sprung out from his not-so-inconspicuous hiding spot behind a tree in poorly restrained eagerness and relief. The other man, lingering at the edges of the forest clearing, clutched two pistols and watched warily.

_“Buck–”_

_“Don’t… not that name. Please.”_  Steve’s expression of near-overwhelming hope seemed to crumble slightly, but recovered again when he said,  _“… Orpheus. Or James, or just Barnes. But not…”_ His voice trailed off, trying to fight off the phantom terrors and pains that dogged his steps each time he heard his former name.

_“Orpheus?”_

_“I’m sorry.”_  He gave Steve a tired, exhausted smile that took all his energy to manage, and let himself fall forward into Steve’s open arms.  _“ _Ganymede,_ I’m so sorry…”_

_"I’m with you, ‘til the end of the line, remember?”_ Steve reached up and touched the marks on his exposed collarbone with a sort of mesmerized awe, the smile lighting up his expression only highlighted by the familiar spark and hum of warmth reverberating through his body. _“Always.”_

It took a total of nine days for the news to leak out, once James – “ _safer_ ,” Sam had said, and he eventually settled on it even though Steve kept frowning whenever he had to say it – returned stateside with them and snuck into Stark’s glass and steel tower in the middle of the night. He’d made the mistake of wandering down to one of the public floors of the tower, and had managed to land himself in the middle of an open common space teeming with enough people to trigger a fight or flight response.

It didn’t help that he recognized at least two HYDRA agents – if the way they had lit up in recognition at the sight of him and began firing on the rest of the crowd was any indication. The debacle ended with the two HYDRA moles staining the carpet with bullets to the kneecaps and wrists, everyone else cowered behind flimsy-looking modern furniture, and the room on lockdown until Steve came crashing through the mechanical duct vent wild-eyed and frantic, with a blonde archer and Iron Man on his tail.

James didn’t really understand how, but in less than twelve hours every news station across the country was running non-stop footage of his scuffle with those HYDRA agents, following massive public outcry against the Avengers for aiding and abetting a mass murderer and HYDRA assassin. Within the next week, he was summoned to stand in a court hearing on Capitol Hill, and three days later a battalion of armed tanks rolled up to Stark Plaza demanding that he surrender himself into federal custody.

He fell asleep that night in a concrete cell, his metal arm spirited away by Steve and Stark before he’d walked out to the soldiers, and fell into the first of many dreams that would bring him shame and guilt: of a dark-haired woman with gentle eyes and a red-lipped smile that brought him a comfort comparable only to the moment he fell into Steve’s arms.

* * *

**“Proud evening star,  
** **in thy glory afar,  
** **and dearer thy beam shall be.”**  
\- Edgar Allan Poe,  _Evening Star_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this is definitely more Steve x Bucky oriented, and it's transitioning from the descriptive narration-style of the first chapter to a more dialogue-heavy one. The next chapter will focus on Darcy coping with the realization that her other soulmates have already basically figured things out, and that she's the third wheel in an established relationship that may or may not even want her. 
> 
> So basically, angst and feels: Steve sort of being a selfish dick, James being confused and scared, and Darcy's dreams and expectations being shattered.
> 
> Also, I won't be writing all of the trial, but I imagine it going a little something like a wonderfully written piece called _[United States v. Barnes, 617 F. Supp. 2d 143 (D.D.C. 2015)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2304905/chapters/5071058)_ by fallingvoices and radialarch. You won't need to read it to understand the next chapter, but it's basically how I imagine the trial to play out save for some minor tweaks to fit the headcanons I've already set up in this 'verse.


	3. Cygnus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He froze, eyes darting between his metal hand and the glowing mark on the inside of her wrist before literally sprinting out of the lab, and when she looked to Steve she couldn’t hide her flinch at the dark glower he gave her as he went after James.

She’d been in college when one of her marks flared to life – the markings on her right arm lit up like a brilliant, sparking bonfire. Meanwhile, the other had remained cold and quiet, flickering every once in a while like a stubborn candle, unwilling to die out. She’d cautiously let herself hope for an instant, her mind going to impossible scenarios and even more improbable odds, but Darcy didn’t hold her breath – that is, until the dreams shifted from frozen silence to an explosion of warmth. 

She followed the whispers and ghost trails, lore and myth and magic that talked of soulmate markings, destiny written across one’s skin, red strings of fate – the parts meant to make her whole when she hadn’t even realized she was in pieces. She dreamt, through the Destroyer in New Mexico, through aliens in New York, through Dark Elves in London – she dreamt of war and blood and death, soldiers lying broken in red-stained soil, of a city burning red and gold against the dark night sky. She dreamt of swans and war and eggs and a wooden horse, and she saw the life of the most beautiful woman in Greece, a woman whose selfishness and lust drove nations to ruin.

Darcy woke up drenched in sweat and furious, repulsed by the arrogance of her past reincarnation – and at the same time, the seeds of doubt planted themselves in her heart. Helen, daughter of a god, queen of a country, princess of a city – the face that launched a thousand ships, and it was so, so ironic because Darcy was nothing even close to what she once was. She was just one in a sea of people, a tiny blip on a radar, and there was nothing special about her – not like Helen – and she pushed the hope to the back of her mind only to succumb to the persistent dreams of cold and ice.

And then one day, after years of fighting memory-myths, of living a life she wanted to forget in her slumbering dreams, she fell asleep and woke to something very, very different. She saw ships and sails and endless skin, felt the firm fingers plucking at her body like a fine-tuned lyre – she let herself submit to the sensation of two sets of lips pressed to each of her breasts. She let herself fall into the fantasy – dark and light on either side, staring down at her with eyes that reminded her of a clear Spartan sky and the churning, stormy sea. 

 _Orpheus. Ganymede_. The names she moaned were etched into her bones and body, written in her veins and buried in her blood like a memory left forgotten, only just brought back to the surface.  She woke to the feelings of hands on her hips, her waist and her chest; the phantom feeling of two bodies, pressed firm and strong against hers – she woke up longing for gold-spun hair and dark brown locks, bodies so entwined together that she couldn’t see where one ended and another began.

She woke, and the once-cold marks on her left arm were dark, dark black, warm to the touch and singing in her blood. And then, staring down at her matching forearms, she’d thought that maybe her life was finally realigning itself and working out.   
  
And then, SHIELD erupted from the inside out, HYDRA emerged from the shadows, and Darcy found her heartmatches in the ravages of the data dump released into the world. 

Captain America and the Winter Soldier – matching marks, one on Steve Rogers’s hand, the other at the base of James Barnes’s spine.  _Soulmates_ , the news stories said – divine intervention, two halves of a whole. Someone helpfully pointed out that the marks were a dead ringer for Cygnus, the swan constellation, and the world went crazy because it had to be a sign. 

Swans mated for life, one of the few species that did – and Darcy didn’t know whether she was supposed to laugh or cry, because she wanted to ask,  _“so where do I fit in?”_  She asked herself the question for nearly a year, Steve gone from the tower and James on the run – and when James was arrested, she followed the trial of the Winter Soldier with baited breath, curled up on the sofa in Stark Tower as she prayed to every deity she could think of. 

When the ruling was decided not guilty on all accounts, she watched, alongside the rest of the world, as Steve jumped the gate and kissed James for the entire world to see. It was the happy ending to what was the most tragic love story of the century, and the acquittal of the Winter Soldier was splashed across headlines for the following two weeks. She was happy, but the doubt that tugged at her heart felt like a battering ram that wouldn’t go away – and it took just one instance to know that all her dreams and expectations would never become a reality.

They met by coincidence, by accident just a few weeks after the trial ended. She’d tried to give them space – tried to ignore the calling, the singing in her blood, the ever-present feeling of weightlessness threatening to take her away – until she’d literally run into them in an empty lab one morning, falling face first into a broad, muscled chest.

 _“Careful, sweetheart,”_  a husky, low voice said softly, and she’d been so surprised to hear his voice that she stumbled backward. A hand caught her by the arm, too firm and cool to be flesh and blood, but the warmth that shot up from the touch felt like fireworks exploding under her skin.

The name slipped out in a breathless gasp.  _“Orpheus?”_  And Steve’s eyes widened before turning stony and hard, but James looked absolutely  _terrified_  as he ripped his hand away from her. He froze, eyes darting between his metal hand and the glowing mark on the inside of her wrist before literally sprinting out of the lab, and when she looked to Steve she couldn’t hide her flinch at the dark glower he gave her as he went after James.

The animosity confused her. Over the course of the next weeks, she’d tried to be friendly, tried to be polite, but only James had slowly warmed to her – Steve seemed only to increase in hostility with ever smile and laugh she managed to wring out of James’s tired, pale face. 

The worst happened nearly two months after their first meeting. She ran into them in the common room while she was snacking on honeyed walnuts, and both of them had stilled at the sight of her. She knew what they were thinking as they stared – she’d had enough dreams about wandering hands and twisted limbs, pale skin glossy and wet with sugar and syrup, and she’d be lying if she hadn’t thought of those moments as she touched herself. James looked like he wanted to eat her alive, his eyes dark and blown wide as he stared at her honey-stained lips, but Steve’s face was carefully blank. It was only when she pressed a sticky kiss to James’s cheek did he let his anger boil over.

 _“What in Zeus’s name do you think you’re doing?”_ he’d hissed, pulling James back and behind him – as if he was protecting him from  _her_ , she realized. He ignored the other man’s protests, fierce and furious as he stared down at her, and she shrunk under his gaze as he and James argued, hissing at each other in a mixture of what she recognized as French and German, interspersed with a little Greek. She picked up the words “ _life-mark_ ” and “ _Helen_ ” and “ _love_ ,” but when Steve hissed, clear and low and sharp like a knife,  _“I don’t want her,”_ it felt like her heart was breaking.

It was James’s turn to be furious, and it wasn’t until he pulled Steve away and out of the room that Darcy realized she was crying. That night, James came to her rooms, and Darcy let herself fall into bed with him despite the rational part of her heart telling her no. He whispered that Steve was going to come around, and rather than dwell on the heartache growing in her chest she pretended to believe him. 

She told herself it didn’t matter that he kept calling her Helen even when she told him her name.  

In the weeks that followed, she ignored Steve. She had hoped that James could talk sense into him, that maybe he just needed time, but it didn’t change. When she tried to apologize, to talk things out, he only brushed her off and left her on the verge of tears. James came to her afterwards, each time kissing her tears away and apologizing for Steve’s words – sometimes, he’d stay the night, whispering into her ear about memories of starlight and sunshine and the Aegean sea after a storm, and she’d bite her lip to hold back the words that he kept refusing to hear, even as she repeated them over and over. 

_“It’s Darcy – not Helen.”_

He clung to a past that didn’t exist, while Steve refused to let go of the one that didn’t include her. She saw the wince that flickered over his face every time Steve slipped, calling him Bucky instead of James. She thought it was ironic, how he was trying to run from a past he felt he didn’t belong to – and despite the sympathy she felt, she could tell her her heart was hardening every time the name “ _Helen_ ” left James’s lips. 

 _“Sorry, I’ll get it right next time,”_  James murmured, squeezing her hands in apology. Always next time, never the present – and after what felt like the hundredth time, Darcy knew what she had to do.

Days later, when she stepped out of the elevator into Tony’s garage, he was waiting for her.

 _“Don’t go,”_  James said quietly, and when he reached out to hold her she let him.  _“He’ll come around.”_

She breathed in slowly, letting herself sink into the warmth of his arms, burrowing her face into the soft cotton of his shirt and just holding herself there. He felt like home and heaven, wrapped up and around her, and she let herself tuck away the memory of the moment into her head and heart. 

 _“Maybe he will,”_  she murmured, and he’d tightened his arms around her and pressed his lips to her temple.  _“But I can’t wait around for him forever.”_

 _“Please,”_  he begged.  _“Just one more chance, Helen.”_

She wanted to cry and scream and yell that she wasn’t Helen, she wasn’t the woman who started a war, she wasn’t the queen or the princess who fell for a cupbearer and a musician. She wasn’t the woman loved two men and was loved in return – she was Darcy, and there was no place in the happily ever after of two people who’d already gone through so much without her.

 _“You’re the love story of the century,”_  she said, and looked away when his eyes begged her.  _“You don’t need me to be happy.”_

 _“We do,”_ he said, and at the look on his face she wanted nothing more than to hold him in her arms and make him smile.  _“We did.”_

 _“Orpheus and Ganymede loved Helen,”_  she whispered.  _“You and Steve been plenty happy without me.”_

And at that, he looked like she had punched him, the fight leaving his lungs in a single, slow sigh that made him curl in on himself, and even though she promised herself that she wouldn’t she reached up to his face. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t move; he just watched her cup his cheeks with her hands, stubble stinging her palms, and when she pressed a quiet kiss to his mouth he let out a shuddering, ragged breath that sounded more like a sob.

 _“I think I could’ve fallen in love with you,”_ she whispered, and she didn’t have to say more than that for him to understand. He stroked the skin of her face with his metal hand, cold and smooth and feather-light, and she turned to press her lips to the mechanized fingers. 

 _“I already did.”_  He stared down at her, and she wanted to cry because she knew was thinking of Helen.  _“And someday, so will Steve.”_

* * *

Darcy Lewis had been born on a cool September evening, wailing at the top of her lungs, with a smattering of marks etched across the skin of her arms, crawling up from her wrists like specks of ink, washed and faded. As a baby, she had cried endlessly, too young to understand that the difference between coldness and pain, and no doctor could tell her parents why. 

When she was six, her babysitter had stared at the hard lines that wound up and around her forearms, and pursed her lips in thought.  _“How long have you had those, Darcy-doll?”_

 _“I dunno.”_  She scrunched her face, glaring at the faded marks.  _“I don’t want them.”_

 _“Oh darling, no.”_  And Miss Stacy scooped her up, pressing kisses to the cold skin.  _“Those mean you’re a lucky girl, Darcy-doll – that you’re special, and you’ll always have two people who will love you forever and ever.”_

 _“I have you and daddy.”_  Darcy looked up at the elder woman, her blue eyes filled with stubbornness.  _“I don’t need anyone else.”_

Twenty years later, she walked away from the two men meant to be her forever – one who loved a long gone memory, and another, who didn’t want her at all. Her dad and Miss Stacy were long gone, and the part of her that was Helen whispered, “ _liar_.”  

* * *

**“Proud evening star,  
** in thy glory afar,   
and dearer thy beam shall be.”  
\- Edgar Allan Poe,  _Evening Star_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... angst. Probably not the happy ending some of you wanted it to be, and definitely unresolved, but I'm sort of satisfied with ending it here. Will come back to edit once I have a fresh set of eyes in the morning, but I wanted to get this out before the year ended. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who gave comments, kudos, and bookmarks - I really appreciate your support for this crazy, oddball universe that doesn't make much sense, but thank you for spending the time to come check it out. Happy New Year to you all! :)

**Author's Note:**

>  **Aquarius** is a constellation of the zodiac; it was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy and remains one of the 88 modern constellations. Its name is Latin for "water-carrier" or "cup-carrier", and is one of the oldest of the recognized constellations along the zodiac. In Greek mythology, Aquarius is identified with beautiful Ganymede, a youth in Greek mythology and the son of Trojan king Tros, who was taken to Mount Olympus by Zeus to act as cup-carrier to the gods.
> 
>  **Lyra** is a small constellation. It is one of 48 listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, and is one of the 88 modern constellations. In Greek mythology, Lyra was associated with Orpheus, a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion and myth. The major stories about him are centered on his ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music, his attempt to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld, and his death at the hands of those who could not hear his divine music. 
> 
> **Cygnus** is a northern constellation lying on the plane of the Milky Way, among the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations. In Greek mythology, Cygnus has been identified with Helen of Troy, upon whose birth Zeus placed a swan in the sky. She was considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world, a representation of ideal beauty. By marriage she was Queen of Laconia, the wife of King Menelaus, but her abduction by Paris, Prince of Troy, brought about the Trojan War.


End file.
